View Single Post
Old 07-24-2014, 12:08 PM   #60
Mert Gambito
Join Date: Jun 2010
Posts: 202
Offline
Re: Demonstrating aiki, demontrating aikido.Same thing ?

Quote:
Cliff Judge wrote: View Post
Ying and yang I can see, because those have basically been adopted into English and roll off the English speaker's tongue more easily than in and yo. Dantien, not so much, you really need a tai chi background for that one. And I recall some debate on here a couple years back about what dantien actually mapped to in the Japanese martial arts lexicon, whether it was tanden or hara or what.

It can make things confusing. For me it makes it more difficult to establish a common ground, because I have no chinese martial arts experience.
Moreso an Asian background: "丹田" -- which is Japanese/Chinese for tanden/dantian -- is not unique to a culture or art, but is discussed on a broader scale among Asian cultures (and not limited to Taoism).

The differences are more in how one or more tanden/dantian, and/or portions therein, are utilized for various purposes. So, if one person is used to using "hara" to do x, and someone else is used to using "tanden" to do y, while yet another uses "dantian" for z -- well, frankly that's Cartesian-style slicing and dicing that a lot of folks on the west Pacific Rim would just shrug about.

Mert
  Reply With Quote